by Donna Tabor

On a lofty Nicaraguan mountainside near

This unlikely group of campesinos (farmers) had joined cooperatively in the mid 80’s, a time when political views mattered, yet they left separate ideologies behind them. The cooperative idea enticed ex-Sandinistas, ex-Contras and members of ex-Guardia (the abusive national guard during the Anastasio Somoza dictatorship), to live and work together as neighbors. They named their farm El Porvenir…The Future.

by Mike Sabine
Linguists have compared observing Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL) to an astronomer being able to watch the big bang. It is generally acknowledged as the only time a grammatically complete language arose spontaneously in modern human history.

The system developed in the early 1980’s in Managua among students in a new school for the deaf who had had no exposure to sign language and thus no way of communicating with one another. They came from around Nicaragua with no exposure to other deaf people, each bringing with them a set of “home signs” they used to communicate with hearing people. Teachers tried futilely to teach the children Spanish and lip reading. Meanwhile, on their own, the students began to communicate among themselves.

Sacuanjoche Kindergarten, a Waldorf Steiner school, recognizes that it is a young child’s nature to experience, explore and come to know the world through the senses and by physically ‘doing.’ Grasping this premise and using it to guide our work is essential for the practical application of Steiner Waldorf philosophy.

What is the Steiner Waldorf System?
Steiner Waldorf education is a path of self-development and training for responsible and enthusiastic participation in the world. The Steiner Waldorf Curriculum supports the child’s developmental stages and children experience the curriculum through repetition and rhythm, cultivating a sense of beauty, wonderment, and self-purpose through the lessons and the environment created within the school. A variety of academic and arts-integrated experiences develop sensory and motor skills, perception of self and the outside world. This cultivates trust, social skills, consciousness, and spiritual awareness. The social climate and the student’s behavior contributing to that climate are equally important to the students’ academic progress. The individual child is an integral part of the wider school community where adults and children of all ages work together with the older children acting as role models for the younger ones.

by Robin Hooper
Living in a four-man tent on and off for four years, building a three-bedroom brick homestead without power tools, waiting all day for a work crew that doesn’t turn up… Sound simple to you? What motivates foreigners to leave behind the security of a job, home, family and friends to start anew in Nicaragua? To find out more, Waves Magazine spoke to two extranjera couples, now living on Ometepe Island, about leaving home, discovering a new one, and facing some of the realities of “getting things done” in Nicaragua.